Real Insight on Performance

[Rahul]

Thanks for the prompt response. Believe me I am fan of FreeBSD
already. Your group size and discipline is what has attracted me to
FreeBSD and the great respect for such work preceding it! It's just
that when it comes to work/business I have to be objective. Hence, the
extensive research I am doing to find the right OS for "my purpose". I
know hardware has a lot to do with floating point calculations,
integer math, pointers, and data caching.

I don't have any utility at the moment I can run to simply measure
performance. And I don't think there will be only one utility running
on there all the time.

For example: I would like to run a high performance web server that
can handle up to 200 connections per second and serve them with great
speed. That's where the concern for multi-threaded support. Depending
on the request, I may have to load (and possibly unload) dynamic
modules to perform calculations, and if need be, fetch data from
either DB or flat file. It could involve connecting to a process on
another box to get request specific command strings. This process
could run for almost 20 hours straight and OS still has to be able to
keep in shape.

Shewww... so there is multiple parts to this. I don't want to throw
hardware as the solution for anything if it could be resolved by
choosing the OS and tuning it. Because hardware only solves problem
temporarily, it does not give you a true measure of your capability
and thus renders any prediction of linear scaling impossible. So on
and so forth.


Thanks again.

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 5:02 PM, Julian Elischer <julian at elischer.org> wrote:
> Rahul wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I am looking to install Unix (and/or like) system for server to run
>> some highly computational and multi-threaded applications. My
>> background being pretty much all Windows, I am a novice to this field.
>> I have grasped some basics by reading some material on web and how-to
>> books but event after extensive digging around on web for real
>> performance numbers on various operating systems, I still haven't
>> found anything useful. Most of the data I found were basically
>> comparisons of operating systems running MySQL or PostgreSQL to see
>> how many connections or simple look up queries they each can server
>> per second sort of things. But nothing that would point to underlying
>> operations like threading, cache-ing, time slicing, I/O, etc.
>>
>> Now, I must admit most of the material showed Linux having upper hand.
>> But I am not convinced FreeBSD would be behind in almost all
>> performance benchmarks from always hearing the legendary performance
>> and stability characteristics of FreeBSD.
>
> most Linux documents will show Linux having hte upper hand of course..
> For computational stuff in my experience (Image analysis software
> using Feedback networks with a mix of floating and fixed point work)
> there was not much to choose between the various OS's because the
> limiting factor tends to simply be the hardware calculating throughput.
> If you have networking or IO as part of the equation then
> of course it's different.
>
> One deal that we can offer you that Linux won't is that if you are prepared
> to work with us, we can help you find any bottlenecks
> that are hitting you..
> (the advantage of working with a smaller group :-)
>
>
>>
>> Can you please shed some light on what I really should be looking for
>> in FreeBSD to optimize it to it's best performance? Am I expecting
>> something that is just purely not BSD's priority or philosophy, per
>> se? Is there some material I can look over? (note: I've gone through
>> the 7.0 Preview and Tuning documentation on FreeBSD's site already.)
>
> you need to tell us more about your workload.
>
>>
>>
>>
>> Thanks.
>> _______________________________________________
>> freebsd-performance at freebsd.org mailing list
>> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-performance
>> To unsubscribe, send any mail to
>> "freebsd-performance-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>
>